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History

While mining for HVACR facts, one could come across rare nuggets of interesting information. Here are a few of them. Apart from being enjoyable bits of trivia, they can spice up conversations or, better still, be deployed to stump a roomful of the fraternity…

Last time round, we went skating from snowclad mountaintops to soda pop carts at street corners, tracing the journey ice cream had traversed over the centuries. This time round, let’s slurp on some ice cream lore.

From a mixture of snow and honey emperors enjoyed in palaces to ice lollies sold at street corners, and from homemade concoctions to mass-produced slabs, ice cream has had a delectable journey, picking up many ingredients, textures and flavours on the way.

History is simultaneous, and not linear, as historians would have us believe. In this tangled simultaneity of events, with claims and counter-claims of being the first one at the finishing line, here’s following one strand...

It wasn’t one single eureka moment that led to the invention of air conditioners. It looks like many inventive minds dreamed up the idea, often simultaneously, and for different reasons. Without wading into the ‘who first’ controversy, here’s raising a toast to all those pioneers.

He’s called “No drama Obama”. A cool customer, this US chief. But a lot has gone into maintaining the temperature of the White House, so presidents can take those big decisions in thermal comfort. Here’s a peek at over 200 years of air conditioning the First Home

If ancient Egyptians used passive evaporative cooling with porous pots of water and damp curtains, the Arabs took it a step forward with wind catchers and muscatese window designs to keep their living quarters cool

So the Romans had hypocausts and frigidariums and the Koreans had ondols. And the Indus Valley Civilisation may have predated them all when it came making indoor air behave itself. But wait, the Egyptians were pretty cool too!